Non-Human Description and Eco-Ekphrasis in Contemporary American Climate Fiction 

This dissertation project examines the production of eco-aesthetics in twenty-first century American climate fiction through descriptions of the non-human and eco-ekphrases. Working with novels by Alexandra Kleeman, Richard Powers, Joy Williams, and Jeff VanderMeer, I argue that descriptions of the non-human and eco-ekphrases both evoke and disrupt the construction of the non-human as other. When taken together, they vivify the complex entanglement(s) between nature and culture and human and non-human and invite the reader to imagine “a new form of being-in-the-world” (Horn 2020, 159; original emphasis).

Description plays an essential function in fiction, making the storyworld accessible to the reader. It represents the things in fiction, enhances the reality effect (Barthes 1982). Yet description is often neglected, a preference for character over setting. Indeed, most ecocritical work implicitly follows Gérard Genette, who considers description the ‘handmaid’ of narrative: “Narrative cannot exist without description, but this dependence does not prevent it from constantly playing the primary role” (1982, 134). Yet the strict hierarchy between narrative and description has been criticized (Mosher 1991; Wolf 2007), and descriptions of nature in contemporary climate fiction play an important role (Stalnaker 2016; Houser 2020), slowing down narrative pace and drawing the reader’s attention to both the non-human constituents of the storyworld and to the construction of the non-human other as such. They can also evoke vivid emotions such as solastalgic distress (Weik von Mossner 2018) or counter-nostalgia (Ladino 2012) in readers, jolting them out of ecological complacency. In some novels, such as Jeff VanderMeer’s Hummingbird Salamander (2021), descriptions of the non-human thematize the continual withdrawal of ‘nature’ through the loss of biodiversity, whereas novels like Alexandra Kleeman’s Something New Under the Sun (2021) present non-human nature as a resilient other that can adapt to human-driven change but that ultimately resists attempts to define it in human terms.

Another type of description, intermedial description, is often deployed alongside descriptions of the non-human in these novels. Intermedial descriptions depict medial entanglements, of which ekphrasis, “the verbal representation of visual representation” (Heffernan 1993, 7), is perhaps the most famous. Depictions of one medium in another are inherently self-reflexive, illustrating the borders (and crossings) between these archly anthropocentric forms of communication, and “point beyond existing orders of the sayable and the visible” in order to “expand the field of existing epistemic and affective possibilities” (Neumann and Rippl 2020, 5-6). Eco-ekphrases (Rippl 2019), ekphrases of ‘nature,’ ‘the environment,’ unsustainable lifestyles, contamination and toxicity, in particular, draw readers’ attention to the moment when judgments of membership to ‘nature’ or ‘culture’ crystallize – and to the culturally-determined processes by which they do so. They thereby document the unstable relationships humans have with the non-human and, as eco-ekphrases of animal drawings in Richard Powers’ Bewilderment (2021) demonstrate, can reflect on and destabilize the nature-culture divide.

Charting the interplay between descriptions of non-human nature and intermedial description, the representation of representation, is an important exploration of the mediation of an Anthropocene eco-aesthetics that takes into account the notion of the environmental imperative, a call to act.

Keywords: Description, eco-ekphrasis, natureculture(s), eco-aesthetics, intermediality, affect, perception, strategies of representation, climate fiction, word-image relations, the more-than- human

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. “The Reality Effect.” In The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. 141-148

Genette, Gérard. Figures of Literary Discourse, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.

Heffernan, James. The Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Horn, Eva. “Challenges for an Aesthetics of the Anthropocene.” In The Anthropocenic Turn: The Interplay between Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Responses to a New Age. Ed. Gabriele Dürbeck and Philip Hüpkes. London: Routledge, 2020. 159-172.

Houser, Heather. “Shimmering Description and Descriptive Criticism.” In New Literary History, 51(1), 2020: 1-22.

Kleeman, Alexandra. Something New Under the Sun. New York: Penguin Randomhouse, 2021. Ladino, Jennifer. Reclaiming Nostalgia: Longing for Nature in American Literature. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012.

Mosher, Harold F, Jr. “Towards a Poetics of ‘Descriptized’ Narration.” In Poetics Today, 12(3), 1991: 425-445.

Neumann, Birgit and Gabriele Rippl. Verbal-Visual Configurations in Postcolonial Literature: Intermedial Aesthetics. London: Routledge, 2020.

Powers, Richard. Bewilderment. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2021.

Rippl, Gabriele. “Sustainability, Eco-Ekphrasis and the Ethics of Literary Description.” In Cultural Sustainability. Ed. Torsten Meireis and Gabriele Rippl. London: Routledge, 2019. 221-232. Stalnaker, Joanna. “Description and the Nonhuman View of Nature.” In Representation 135, Summer 2016: 72-88.

VanderMeer, Jeff. Hummingbird Salamander. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.

Weik von Mossner, Alexa. “From Nostalgic Longing to Solastalgic Distress: A Cognitive Approach to Love in the Anthropocene.” In Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Embodiment, Environment. Ed. Kyle A. Bladow and Jennifer K. Ladino. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018. 51-70

Williams, Joy. Harrow. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2021.

Wolf, Werner. Description in Literature and Other Media. Amsterdam: Rodolpi, 2007.